A LECTURE 


BR 128 

MsP3 





TO THE 


DEHRA DOON BRAHMO SOMAJ, 


GIVEN, JUNE 29, 1876, 



C. H. A, DALL, M. A. 


AS BOUND TO LOVE AND HONOR: 
SO FREE TO SFEAH AND ACT. 


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Calcutta: 

CALCUTTA CENTRAL PRESS COMPANY, LX)., 

5, COUNCIL HOUSE STREET. 


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1877 









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A LECTURE 


TO THE 


DEHRA DOON BRAHMO SOMAJ, 

GIVEN, JUNE 29, 1876, 



.As BOUND TO LOTS AND HONOB : 
SO FBEB TO SPEAK AND ACT. 



Calcutta: 

CALCUTTA CENTRAL PRESS COMPANY, LIT, 

5, COUNCIL HOUSE STREET. 

1877 












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TO THB 

DEHRA DOON BRAHMO SOMAJ, 

ON 

THE TRUE LIFE. 


“ I am come that they might have life; and have it more 
abundantly.” —Jesus. —[John X. 10.] 

“ Reconciled by his death, we are saved by his Liee.” —St. 
Paul.—[Rom. V. 10.] 

[While the audience was gathering at the Royal 
Hotel, Dehra Doon, the use of the hall having been 
freely given by Mr. Gee, the proprietor,—the lecturer 
was drawn into conversation with arriving friends. 
Questions were put and answered,—as to the progress 
of the Brahmo Somaj in Calcutta (eleven hundred 
miles away;) as to the speaker’s acquaintance with 
Baboo K. C. Sen ; his co-operation with the practical 
reforms of the Progressive Brahmos, through the 
Indian Mirror and otherwise;—and his sympathy, as 
a Unitarian Christian, with their devout thinking and 
benevolent aims. The audience consisted of members 
of the local Somaj and of native Christians, many of 



[ 2 ] 

both being employed in the office work of “ the Great 
Trigonometrical Survey” at Dehra. There were also 
present English and American ladies and gentlemen, 
mostly missionaries. At the appointed hour, the 
address was given substantially as follows :]— 

The True Life. 

Brothers of the Dehra Doon Brahmo Somaj, Friends 
of Truth, Ladies and Gentlemen,—I am here to 
speak to you of the True Life. By it I mean all 
feeling, believing, thinking and doing that we can or 
will accept of the divine life brought down into the 
human. Its ideal is godliness or sonship to God : and, 
as realized, is practical theism; that actual living 
which shows, rather than says, “My meat is to do the 
will of Him that sent me.” God never fails: He 
always succeeds. So this True Life, the vitality of 
God in man, is crowned with a splendid promise of 
success. Every seed is a promise and a prophecy, and 
the life we now live is a seed-life partaking of the 
divine nature, and sure to live and grow,—not without 
our self-fidelity,—while God lives. 

Life is one. 

First and midst and last the True Life is a unit; a 
unit of conscious existence; a personal atom ; a spark 
of divine fire that never goes out. On and on forever, 


[ 3 ] 

it is one and the same. It is I, and none other, under 
whatever outward conditions, or manifold development. 
This fact, not of memory alone, but of intuition, is 
original and beyond argument. On it hinges all per¬ 
sonal responsibility ; all gain, all loss; all present reward, 
all coming retribution. What touches it with a stain any 
where, stains it all through. Never let me forget how 
essentially and indivisibly I am one. What my hand 
does, I do. What my foot does, I do. What the flesh 
does, I do. I cannot wrong the body, but I injure the 
soul. Never let me plead for a mischivous indulgence, 
in alcohol or tobacco for example, as if a bodily excess 
could hurt the body only. No, no. It is I that do it. 
Every false look or idle word tells on me, and is my 
falsehood. It goes to make my character, and counts 
in the inevitable reckoning. I remember, years ago, 
that certain Berlin fanatics, arrested by the police 
in their vile orgies, sought refuge in the plea, 
—when the soul is absorbed in Grod, then the flesh 
cannot commit sin. No, nothing is done by the flesh 
but the soul does it. And by the soul here, I mean 
not merely that in me which worships, but my inner 
and essential life, myself, me. Have I yet to learn 
that my heaven or hell, here and hereafter, is in me : in 
my consiousness of harmony with the eternal verity, or 
in the depth of my departure from it. Never let me 
forget that my character is my salvation; and that he 


[ 4 ] 

only is my friend, or father or saviour, who helps me to 
be true. As the snail secretes its fitting shell, and the 
brain the skull, so the soul makes the body. The flesh 
is the chosen language of the soul, and by it character 
is known. Hence the popular commemoration of a 
noble character by copying its envelope, its flesh, in 
bronze or marble. Dying is secretion or excretion. 
It is but casting off a covering. We are dying all the 
time. It is anything but “ the great change.” It is no 
change in we. The hour after deatth I am just what 
I was the hour before death. Only I re-clothe myself 
in garments less capable of hiding my essential spiritual 
ugliness or beauty, of concealing the truth or falsehood, 
good or evil, that I have lived for, and am. At death 

the body goes off, and I go on. If I have not 

weighted myself with evil, to drag me down, my 

rising to a larger life is sure as that of a liberated 

balloon. Tling out the sand-bags and cut the ties of 
evil habit, and be ready to go upward,— and resurrec¬ 
tion, ascension, is as natural as of cork in water. No¬ 
thing can break this unity of life. Beyond contradic¬ 
tion life is one. 


Ltfe is Two. 

One as it is, and indivisible, we yet speak of it as 
two, in view of the fact that all life is growth. In 
daily resurrection from good to better, it is a birth out 


[ 5 ] 

of the lower into the higher.—It goes from strength to 
strength; from plane to plane. It is a transfer from one 
condition to another. Man lives not two lives, but 
two sorts of life ; first of the body, as an animal; then 
of the soul, as a man, or a child of God. In declaring 
this doubleness, we still cling to the oneness, by our 
double use of the word self. We use “self” 
for the lower man and “ self” for the higher. 
We have, in fact, a whole class of •vsords thus 
doubly used; which lead the unschooled into endless 
confusion. If “ self” be used—as it is used—to mean 
the angel in us, and “ self” to mean the devil in us ; 
if “ self” mean light, and “ self” mean darkness; if 
“self” be our glory and “self” be our shame;—and 
the individual reader or hearer is left to decide which 
is which, in every instance,—let him be on his guard. 
The power of discrimination is ours, as to which self 
is intended, in a given case. Use that power, says the 
Giver, or lose it and be mis-led. Yes; we have reflec¬ 
tive verbs and nouns in all languages. And the 
great question of life is to decide which self we stand 
for, by our self-indulgence or our self-respect. None 
can choose for me the self in whose kingdom I will 
mainly live. Nor is God’s will ever literally and 
logically to become my will, nor mine His. Let mine 
be His in likeness to His love and trust in the right. 
Never can my thought be God’s thought—nor does 


[ 6 ] 

God wish me to lose myself in Him, He permits no 
absorption—no Nirvana. Saturn may devour his 
children, but God is a Father, and no father cares to 
extinguish his son. On the contrary the father’s glory 
is in the son’s increasing life. His joy is in the ever- 
enlarging self-development, self-reliance of his child. 
The manlier my child grows, the less do I care to 
watch him. Can I largely trust him ? Yes. Then I 
am not anxious to know what he is doing. So God,— 
as I believe, withholds his inspection; and restrains 
His omniscience; and prefers not to know, at times, 
what I am doing. As a father, I have this joy; so I 
know He has it. 

A true marriage is a harmony of two wills. The 
two are one ; yet, being one, they are two. No loving 
husband would desire a wife to think only his 
thought. She could receive no trusts from him, nor 
ever be his counsellor in perplexity or his help-meet 
in trouble, had she no will of her own. So God wants 
His faithful child to have a will of his own, now and 
evermore. 

Life is two, in the fact that I am at once an animal 
and a man. I am bound to do my animal self no 
harm, but to keep it in its place ; and treat it as kindly 
as I do other animals,—my dog or my donkey. 
Still there is here a servant and a master. Repenting 
of some folly, Gopal says that he is ashamed of him- 


[ 7 ] 


self. How so ? Can Gopal be ashamed of Gopal ? 
Not if there be only one. Not unless there be two. 
There are two. The lower has disobeyed the higher 
his natural sovereign. Now the higher Gopal says 
to the lower—What are you about? Ki-horch- 
isJi ? I am ashamed of you! Here we have the 
double self. Each good in its place, One belongs to 
man as an eater, drinker, sleeper, and user of things 
that perish; and the other to man as worshipper, a 
thinker, and doer of good ; and a lover of truth and 
right, of God and duty. Mischief comes, as I said, 
from not seeing this doubleness, and apparent contra¬ 
diction in a large class of words, such as nature, self, 
world, and so on. Nature is brutish; nature is 
divine. God loves the world; love not the world. 
“ Love thy neighbour as thyself.” Shall I try to love 
my brother better than myself? “Yes,” said our 
dear Keshub Baboo, in the Calcutta Town Hail. 
And I too say “Yes,” if you mean the animal self. 
But it is clear that, in declaring this law of brother¬ 
hood, Confucius does not mean the brute self. Nor 
did Jesus, when summing up, in his two “ great” 
commandments, all that man could be or do. On his 
lips, the law, “ Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thy¬ 
self” means as thine own soul ; thy better self. Love 
him according to thy highest conception of the merci¬ 
ful and just, the wise and true, the self-sacrificing and 


[ 8 ] 

self-ruling. Love him as you love your own man¬ 
hood made divine. Make your brother as true and 
as perfect a lover, believer, thinker, and worker as you 
would make yourself. Can you do better ? No. So 
life is two; and the question, for me, of heaven or 
hell, here and hereafter, is the question Which of 
these two men I am—which, the spiritual or the carnal, 
do I give myself to serve, and to be. 

Life is Four. 

Again—Life is not only one; and it is not only 
two. It is four. Human life, like plant-life, has its 
root, its stem, its branches and its fruit. Life is four¬ 
fold, as naturally as the seasons are four; spring, 
summer, autumn, winter. Life is four as clearly as 
the cardinal points of the map are four—north, south, 
east and west. On my chart of life—heart, soul, 
mind and will, Antakaran , JBran , Chitta, SaJcti , are 
the four cardinals. For years I have so regarded and 
so designated them; and more and more have come to 
accept the “cardinals,” as I call them, as the beginning 
of a theological technology , a thing greatly needed, 
to-day, by scientific students of religion. Say four 
“ cardinals,” and you have four convenient technics, 
which are four capacious, and, at the start, empty 
drawers, awaiting the bestowal of all the proven facts 
of life, intuitional and extuitional; of all the elements 



t 9 i 

of all religions; and indeed of all words in all 
tongues that tell of life, human or divine. Without 
accepted technical terms, under which all generous 
students consent to classify universally acknowledged 
facts, there can be no real progress in any science. 
So let the word be “cardinal.” Then our first 
cardinal will be what first appears in the infancy of 
human experience—affection. A man is born as an 
infant, all feeling ; all smiles, and tears. He comes, 
secondly, to believe. He is a child, all hopes and 
fears. Thirdly, he asks questions, and learns to think. 
Fourthly, to act and govern. Corresponding to 
the body’s infancy, childhood, youth and maturity, are 
life’s love, faith, knowledge and power. I am indebted 
to the Bible for this analysis of life; as where 
Jesus teaches me that “ The first of all the command¬ 
ments of God”—dependent upon His absolute Unity 
—is that man should draw nearer and nearer to God 
with all his faculties and all his possibilities; should 
come to the All-loving, All-holy, All-wise, and 
Almighty One—with all that in him which can love and 
worship and know and rule ; that is to say, with all 
his heart and all his soul and all his mind and all his 
might. 

I was once interested in phrenology. But when 
I found that the elements of life, or mind, as given 
by phrenology, to the number of thirty or forty, easily 


[ 10 ] 

resolved themselves into the four cardinals of life, as 
given by Jesus,—I left the complex system for the 
simple one. Again, remembering that language comes 
out of life, I turned to the dictionary, and found that 
its tens of thousands of words—all at least that 
designate what is human—fell into column, exhaus¬ 
tively, in fonr brigades, under the generalship of one 
or the other of these four elements. What convinc¬ 
ing testimony was this, of the radical soundness of a 
four-fold analysis of human life. 

Once more, who has not longed to find a criterion or 
judgment-seat of truth, catholic enough to declare the 
merits and defects of all religions ? A brief record of 
principles so absolute as to cover Zoroaster, Confucius, 
Sakya Muni, Abraham, Jesus, Mahomed, with its 
righteous award: and by which one and all of the 
founders of religions that have rallied their hundred 
millions of disciples, with one voice consent to 
abide. Under the directing providence of God, I 
believe that we have this criterion of all religions 
in Jesus’ declaration of the “ first and great com¬ 
mand.” This criterion ripened, in Hebrew ex¬ 
perience, from the days of Moses, and fell in its 
maturity, from the lips of Christ; to the effect that 
the very life of God as reflected on earth in man, his 
noblest work, is a life of love, of faith, of wisdom, 
and of beneficent power. Thus, all true religion is 


[ 11 ] 

found in likeness to God, Godliness,—Theism. And 
Godliness is a divine life : the true life of Feeling, 
Trust, Knowledge, and Strength; i.e ., of the highest 
normal action of the Heart, the Soul, the Mind, the 
Will. These four breathe, in some measure, through 
every movement of life. Their endlessly harmonized 
combinations answer to the religion of humanity ; 
absolute religion ; God’s religion ; the Life of God as 
possible to man. Think of this, my friends, and 
especially my fellow-theists, my brother Brahmos. 
Let this quaternion of absolute principles, this crite¬ 
rion of divine and human judgment, in its four-fold 
simplicity, be, from this hour, laid home to your 
hearts. Let it guide your studies, your self-examina¬ 
tion, your aspirations for life, present and eternal. 

Friends, you see what True Life is: life in its 
unity of personal consciousness ; life in its duality of 
tendencies, (downward to the lower, and upward to 
the higher self, in its appointed struggle from the 
animal to the human;) and life in its root, stem, 
branches, and fruit, its quaternity. 

And now, have I not said enough to close with 
simply commending the one subject most interesting 
of all to a human being,—the elements of life,-—to 
your own thoughts, inquiries, studies, and observation. 


[ 12 ] 

But Friends. —There are, in this connection, three 
or four things to which your attention may be pro¬ 
fitably directed. I am sure you will listen thought¬ 
fully to the following queries, and my solution of 
them :— 

1. Are not the four cardinals of life (our ulti- 
rnates) of equal value, aud co-ordinate, like the eye 
the ear, the hand ? 

2. Are we not, in our exercise of them, both 
bound and free ? Are we not as naturally bound in 
the first and second, as free in the third and fourth ? 
Must we not confess that there is no manly life, ex¬ 
cept as the joint action and result of this double 
bondage and double freedom ? As I see it, the in¬ 
tuitions of feeling and faith supply life’s orbit with its 
consenting or centripetal force ; and the extuitions of 
study and work give it its dissenting, individualizing, 
centrifugal force. And their just balance is true life. 

3. The special needs of Hindoo life. "What are 
these ? It is not perfect. How may it be brought 
towards perfection ? 

4. What man is known, for all in all, to have lived 
nearest to a just balance of the four cardinals ? Who 
has best harmonized feeling, faith, thought, and will ? 
In other words, who is our model-man, the finest type 
of humanity, so far as we know ? What is his 
name ? 


[ 13 ] 

Heabt, Soul, Mind and Will co-ordinate. 

To me, tbe four cardinals of life are not only nor¬ 
mal, radical, and ultimate, but of equal value. In 
the high court of conscience, they are four distinct 
witnesses, and in that court one man’s word is as good 
as another’s. The extuitions, equally with the in¬ 
tuitions, are essential to true religion. All religion is 
life. All true life is divine. So that work is as 
religious as prayer. God is the great geometer and 
mathematician ; and likeness or sonship to God is not 
more truly but as truly found in that intellectual 
ability which mathematically discovers the planet 
Neptune, or reckons the parallax of Sirius, as 
in the sincerest and most protracted worship 
of the grandest temple or house of God. Thus you 
see that if Love (or Joy), Prayer, Knowledge, and 
Work be alike precious in the sight of God, we cease 
to make the old distinction between them, as secular 
and religious, sacred and profane. For example, in 
our definition of religion, whatever Government does 
for India, which is good and right, is done religiously. 
Government is not godless or irreligious in abstaining 
from the enforcement of this or that man’s theory of 
faith. Call this noble catholicity ‘secular’ if you like. 
The wise and broad-hearted know that it is religious, 
And the time is coming when, before God, all Theists 
(and why not all good Hindoos and good Christians) 


[ 14 ] 

will rejoicingly acknowledge that it is religious, 
because it is at once merciful and just. You see what 
1 mean by the co-ordination of the four cardinals. 
Think of it. See in it how grand a thing is true 
salvation. We are saved in the soul by faith, which 
asks no questions; but quite as much in the mind by 
thought, which demands a reason, and asks why and 
on what grounds we believe. So we may be lost by 
faith without thought, which is blind confidence ; and 
lost by thought without faith, which is scepticism. It 
may be with the inner man as with the outer. The 
body is, at one time, saved by the eye , seeing the 
approach of harm; at another by the ear detecting 
invisible danger; at another by the hand warding it 
off; and at another by the foot, putting us out of its 
reach. Co-ordinate in value, and equally essential to 
salvation, are lBhaJcti, Yoga (or Dhyan ), Gy an and 
Karma , one as important as the other; provided we 
interpret these words broadly, to mean right Feeling, 
Faith, Intelligence, and Practice,—the four cardinals 
of life. Let the weak—or such as cannot at once 
smile and pray, or pray and think, or pray and act, or 
say, on 4 holy’ days, “My Father worketh and I work,” 
—let such never pray at their work, nor smile in 
church, nor read secular things on sacred days. I 
suppose a vast numerical majority of men to-day to 
be in this predicament. Complete salvation is as im- 


[ 15 1 

possible to such men as manhood’s wisdom, or man¬ 
hood’s self-reliance to the little child. Let such, I say, 
be saved as children, confessing that they are not yet 
capable of being saved as men. At the same time, if 
God has given me grace to be saved as a man, as free 
to think and act, as I am bound to trust the truth and 
love it, let them not discourage nor disdain my efforts 
to be a true child and something more—even a true 
man. If the four cardinals of life be co-ordinate, and 
one is as dear to God as the other, the second cardinal 
can no longer, as in days gone by, usurp the name pf 
the “ religious faculty” and say, “ Business is business, 
and religion is religion.” No: all the cardinals are 
equally religious. Religion is life. And true life is 
of the heart, soul, mind and will, in their countless 
harmonies, and in all their imaginable blendings and 
combinations. ‘Truth,’ in the Western world, is the 
consenting testimony of the four cardinals, with the 
Illd for a speaker. ‘Right’ is the same consent on 
its practical side, culminating in the IVth cardinal. 
For truth’s sake and for God’s sake let us instantly 
and everywhere discourage the destructive error of 
the past—whereby these normal faculties of life have 
been pitted one against the other, and set to fight, like 
elephants and tigers. Blessed is he who is permitted 
to know that love and hope and wisdom and w ork 
are equally needful to man and honorable to his 


C 16 ] 

Creator—the four cardinals equally religious and 
co-ordinate. 


II.—As Bound, so Free. 

Again; it is a law of the True Life to be at once 
bound and free; forever bound, forever free. Thy 
service ( gholami ) is perfect freedom. Thy will be 
done; my will be done ; these two are one. As a bond- 
slave to the tiuth, I am God’s own freeman, and not 
otherwise. So the truth makes me a slave. Yet he 
is a freeman whom the truth makes free. Serving God 
in all things, I am Lord of all; a thrall, a king : 
having nothing, yet possessing all things. Thus ‘ ‘ all 
power is given unto me in heaven and in earth.” God is 
almighty, because He cannot be untrue. He is free, 
because bound to be true. The divine nature is divine 
because of this Life, this perfect balance of forces. 
Free thought is free, Free religion is free, only so far 
as it is bound to be just. Know the truth, in its left 
wing, (I and II), and truth will bind you fast to 
your duty. Know the truth in its right wing (III and 
IV), and truth will make you free to study its claims, 
and free to do all that is good and right. Would you 
be free to think and act, be bound to think generous¬ 
ly and to act justly. In morals, as in the solar system, 
freedom alone, or the centrifugal force unchecked, is 
ruin. And bondage alone, or the centripetal force un- 


[ 17 ] 

checked, is ruin. Only the balanced antagonism of 
the two is the harmony of life—the orbit of perfect 
manhood. Thus man is as bound as he is free, and 
free as bound ; no more no less. 

III. —Hindooism Needs Study and Foece. 

For ages, Hindooism has centred in the second 
cardinal of life ; and still denies essential Christianity, 
whose first principle is perfect living, in the co-ordina- 
nation and harmony of the four cardinals. “Go to 
God,” says Jesus, “with all thy heart (I), and with 
all thy soul (II), and with all thy mind (HI), and with 
all thy strength (IV). This is the first and great com¬ 
mand of your Creator j of “ your Father and my 
Father, of your God and my God.” Ancient Hindoo¬ 
ism grandly stood for life’s second cardinal. Centuries 
passed, and the unnatural attempt to shut in the 
enlarging life of man, and limit it to a single cardinal, 
issued in a protest: a grand appeal for the growth of 
the first cardinal. This protest took the name of 
Buddhism ; and, under that name, was welcomed in 
India for a thousand years. The day at last arrived 
when the Brahmins had to acknowledge this. They 
gave up their Ashwamedas and holocausts of blood, 
and became tender-hearted towards the horse, the 
cow—all life and all sensitive existence. Hindooism 
at length banished the name of Buddhism, by accept- 


[ 18 J 


inor its ideas. Centuries later, when Hindooism, or 
Brahminism, grew slack in its allegiance to the first 
cardinal, affection , Yaishnavism came with its Bhalcti. 
Bhakti meant religion not merely as worship, but 
also as love and joy in God. Sects of Hindoos also 
plead, in isolated bands, for Oyan , life in its third 
cardinal. Others again stand for the rights of the 
fourth. The Bhagavad Gita, because it sought, though 
in a limited w T ay, to admit the fourth cardinal as 
ancillary to the second, and lifted its voice for some 
sort of doing , ‘ Karma Yoga/ as religious, is 
accepted for the “ Gospel of Hindooism” by the 
more intelligent idolators, and orthodox Hindoos • who 
still, in their hearts, regard idols as toys for 
children.* Bear in mind the almost innumerable 
sects of Hindooism, and there is hardly an element 
of the Gospel of Christ that has not some Hindoo 
sect to plead for it. Still it is true, and Brahmos 
should never forget, that the religion of India, in the 
past, has never been large enough for a world’s religion. 
It has been grandly helpful to the infancy of India. 
It has nobly surrendered itself to the doctrine of 
salvation by faith alone—which many Christians 
teach—childhood’s own faith in the unseen and 
invisible. Not only the faith, but ille joy of living 


* Such a Hindoo was the Eajah Radhakanta Deva, for thirty 
yeara a leader of old Hindooism in Bengal. 



[ 19 ] 

unto God has been revealed to India. The time has 
now come for India to make a stand for science (ill) 
and for personal force and self-rule (IV). 

Brahmos— you at least will not be content with 
BhaJcti and Yoga , the first and second cardinals of 
life. —You will do more than love as infants, and pray 
as children. You will not forsake home, and wife and 
child and the heaven-appointed discipline of business — 
life’s best educators,—as the Buddha did, and fly to 
the jungles for religion. I should honor Jesus less 
were I not persuaded that tradition speaks truly of 
him as a tireless worker and bread-winner from his 
very boyhood; and as not only never turning hermit, 
but as the head of a family, the supporter of his 
mother and her children, Jesus was the 1 first-bovn.' 
of an early-widowed mother ; and her family of sons 
and daughters fell, as I believe, to his charge. The 
first thirty years of his life appear to have been those 
of a worker, whose joy was in fidelity to his and our 
commonest duties. When “ he began to be about 
thirty years of age,” says the record, he went forth to 
proclaim to others, outside his home, the truth he had 
found. And how did he find it ? By first living it 
and earning it, as we must earn it, through the actual 
doing of God’s will, amid all the providential relations 
and opportunities of life. It is such day-by-day 
acquaintance with homely realities and trials that will 


[ 20 ] 


make us men; not our shirking them like a falceer; 
nor, by a frantic excess of the second cardinal, in 
meditation, hoping to “ escape birth, pain, sickness, 
decrepitude and death,” like Sakya Muni. May God 
give to the Brahmo Somaj,—and through Brahmoism 
to India,—what Hindooism needs above all things, 
namely, a new and just appreciation of the third 
and fourth cardinals of Life; say, of science and of 
work. 


IV. — Who is the model-man? 

This is my last question—Who shall lead us ? Who 
shall be our guide ? Who is our chqsen model ? I say, 
he who has best lived out, and balanced most truly, 
the cardinals of life; has lived out, not one cardinal, 
nor two, nor three only, but all four. The founder of 
Brahmoism, as you know, has strongly and clearly 
declared himself a believer in the leadership of one 
man, and of only one, as his preferred type and model 
of real greatness, his commander-in-chief.* 


* Our great Rammohun says—“ This epithet, ‘ the Son of God,’ 
with the definite article prefixed, is appropriated to Christ . 
as a distinct mark of honor, which he alone deserves.” (The 
italics are Rammohun Roy’s)—See his “Precepts of Jesus,” 2nd 
London Edition (1834,) page 184. In this work, note also 
Rammohun’s words “Jesus of Nazareth, the highest of all the 
prophets”; “Jesus the Founder of true religion”; “Jesus justly 
esteemed a Saviour”; “ A Being in whom dwelt all truth” ; 
“ His life dec.ares him to have been pure as light, innocent as a 
lamb and great as the angels of God, or rather greater than 
they; ” &c. (page 206 et passim.) 



C 21 ] 


As the greatest of religious leaders, you know that 
Jesus has to-day but four rivals; Confucius, the 
Buddha, Moses and Mahomed. What others have 
been, or might have been, is not the question. I 
speak of to-day, and of things as they are now 
believed. The second cardinal deals with the imper¬ 
sonal and invisible, as naturally as the ear with 
sound ; and Hindooism stands for the second cardinal. 
Hindooism and the Brahmins, therefore, including 
many second cardinal minds in all religions, acknow¬ 
ledge no typal man, and look up to no personal God. 
As Brahmos we can spare none of the old Hindoo’s 
(II) devout aspiration; none of his worship of the 
Ineffable. To that aspiration 11 with all the soul,” we, 
adding Bhalcti , cling to our Father, “ with all the 
heart.” The tender mercy (I) of the Buddha to 
everything that lives and feels, is ours. We rejoice 
in all the temperance of Confucius, the agnostic 
positivist, antedating Jesus by at least five centuries. 
Moses and Mahomed too are noble defenders of the 
primal and over-arching truth of Jesus, “ The Lord 
our God is one Lord,” eh ebad dwiteeum. These we 
honor: but can accept neither of them as the best 
models of Life, domestic or otherwise. Our master 
in the art of living, we repeat, is not Confucius. Or 
Moses? No. Mahomed? No. The Buddha? No. 
Jesus? Yes. And why Jesus ? I answer, not because 


[ 22 ] 

of his “ Precepts,” (III) merely. We find precepts , 
good and true, in many scriptures. Not because— 

‘ Cold mountains and the midnight air, 

Witnessed the fervor of his prayer.' 

No. None pray (II) more sincerely than Hindoos. 
Not wholly because Jesus exceptionally loved his 
fellow-men (I) ; many have died to save sinners; 
many mothers, many martyrs. Not because, if we 
compare the force (IV) of Jesus with that of iron 
ordnance—the point-blank range of the shot he dis¬ 
charged has sped, to our knowledge, 24,000 miles, and 
still sustains itself, on and on, without deflection. No; 
for no single one of these, by itself and alone, do we 
follow Jesus. We should be glad to love men better 
than Jesus loved his friends; aye, and his foes. We 
will do so if we can, but to-day we cannot find a 
grander lover than he. He prayed as he breathed, 
and in his intuitions of the coming life and of invisi¬ 
ble realities, faith seems changed to sight. May our 
faith be as steady and as clear as his, in life, in death. 
His devotion of his ripest days and thoughts not 
merely to domestic, but to public good and the 
salvation of an ignorant world, by his labors as a 
teacher; these we emulate. The self-control and 
beneficent power with which, beyond contradiction, he 
spoke and did the truth, and died rather than shrink 
from his duty to God and man, we honor more highly 


[ 23 ] 

the more we study it. We know, too, that such 
heroism could not have been put on record had it not 
been accomplished. It could not have been invented. 
No, it is not for any single one of these,— i. e as the 
model lover, or the true believer, or the essential 
truth-teacher, or the man of power,—that we elect to 
follow Jesus. Not for any one of these by itself, but 
for them all together. How can we affirm that in all 
history some man or woman may not have loved, on 
earth, as truly as Jesus did? Some grand old Hindoo 
may have surpassed him in ascetic devotion. Some 
scholar, perhaps many, may have exceeded him in 
learning, or philosophy, or science. Excepting, by the 
way, the science of Life. Believing that gentle forces 
are the mightiest, i. e ., spiritual forces, we can hardly 
think of a character in history fuller of personal force 
than that of Jesus. It is not, I repeat it, for his suc¬ 
cess in any one cardinal of life that we would make 
Jesus our elder brother, our preferred counsellor and 
guide, our master-spirit, pattern and model. No; but 
for his unattained and pre-eminent, but we trust not 
unattainable, integrity, totality, and harmony of life; 
our possible life, balanced in all its manifold powers 
and cardinal faculties. We would not lose any good 
thing that God has ever sent into the world by any of 
His children. But we prefer Jesus as our largest 
harmonizer of all their good; of their love and joy, 


[ 24 ] 

of their faith and aspiration, of their common sense, 
of their heroic fortitude; and, in one word, of their 
godliness, their righteousness, their many-sided truth¬ 
fulness to God, and to man, and to themselves. 

Such are my answers to the four questions.—(1) 
Are the cardinals of life co-ordinate ? They are. (2) 
Only as bound to love and honor truth am I free to 
think and act ? Only so. (3) Do Hindoos, do we 
Brahmos, emphatically need development in science 
and in ability as rulers ? We do. (4) What man is 
known to have lived, for all in all, nearest to God; 
nearest to the just balance of our powers; so as to be 
our finest model? What is his his name ? Jesus. 

Now, farewell. And do not forget that each one 
of you is a winged thing unborn ; a bird in the egg, 
a seed in the shell. The slightest injury done now, 
to this embryo—think, oh think, how it may forever 
and ever dim the eye, deafen the ear, twist the leg, 
club the foot, cripple the wing of that which says “ I,” 
for all the coming life of this bird of heaven—this 
child imperishable, of the Infinite One. 


“ The Highest is present to the soul of man. It is for this dread 
Universal Essence that all things exist. By this they are: this, 
not wisdom or love, or beauty, or power, but all in one. Only 
Spirit creates. Behind nature, throughout nature, Spirit is pre¬ 
sent. And Spirit is one, not compound. Spirit does not act 
upon us from without, in space and time,—but spiritually, 
through ourselves. The Supreme Being does not build up nature 
around us, but puts it forth through us, as the life of the tree 



[ 25 ] 


puts forth new leaves through the pores of the old. As a plant 
upon the earth, so a man rests upon the bosom of God;—is 
nourished by unfailing fountains; and draws, at his need, inex¬ 
haustible powers. Who can set bounds to the possibilities of 
man P Once inspire the Infinite, by being admitted to behold the 
absolute nature of Justice and Truth; and you learn that man 
has access to the entire mind of the Creator, and is creator, in 
the finite. This view of Spirit, as behind and above nature,— 
showing me where the source of power lies,—and pointing to 
virtue as— 

“ The golden key 

Which opes the palace of eternity,” 
carries on its face the highest certificate of truth, because it 
animates me to create my own world, through the purification of 
my soul.” 


R. W. Emerson. 



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